Architects of Fear

Who runs the world? Most of us wonder that at times. Is there a mysterious They, a group of
secret conspirators who manipulate world events? Almost as soon as we ask the question, we
dismiss it as absurd. We are taught to believe that the world works in more complex and subtle
ways.

When, for example, we consider what started World War II, we see many possibilities: the
tensions resulting from carving up the Austro-Hungarian empire; the tangle of treaties and
secret pacts among the European nations; the effect of the world depression on the German
economy; the pressures resuiting from German, Italian, and Japanese expansionism. And there
are the less tangible factors as well-the character of a nation, the spirit of an age, the
pathological drives of leaders seeking power.

Explanations for the way the economy operates are equally elusive. When we ask why prices
rise and fall, we are presented with a web of interrelated factors: the rate of production of the
nation's factories; the relative size of the gross national product, federal deficit, and money
supply; the price of gold compared to the price of the dollar; the fluctuations of the world
currency exchange; the balance between U. S. imports and exports; the changing demographic
characteristics of the population; the social and psychological aspects of consumption.

In other words, there are no final answers. History and economics are not puzzles to solve.
There is no "right" solution, but only models to help us understand. Faced with the world's complexity and uncertainty,
we don't stop seeking explanations. The search for order is one of the most elevating of human
activities, even though we know it is a quest that can never end. As the amount of information we
possess increases, and we are exposed to an accelerating number of theories and conflicting
points of view, we learn to absorb into our world view the idea that there are a number of
different ways to interpret events - that there is not a single all-embracing system. We learn
that knowledge is dynamic, not static - that reality looks different to different people.

This book is about a large number of Americans who reject this pluralistic view. They have
taken to an extreme the desire to find connections between events, to find a cause for every
effect. They don't react to new information and ideas by adapting. Instead they try to squeeze the
world into their systems. They have a deep-seated suspicion that someone is responsible for the
world's problems: Communists, Jews, Catholics, bankers, intellectuals, secular humanists -
or,
simply, Satan. To rationalize their fear and hatred they build elaborate systems explaining all
the world's troubles as part of a conspiracy. Inflation, they say, is caused by Jewish bankers
plotting to wreck America - or by Communists, or by a combination of the two. World War II is
dismissed as a Vatican (or Jewish or Communist) plot.

Most of us at one time or another engage in this kind of thinking. After the Kennedy
assassination, many people found it easier to believe in a plot involving the CIA, KGB, and FBI
than to accept the seemingly absurd notion that an angry gunman could kill a president and
change history. But there is a difference between those who occasionally succumb to the
attraction of pat, conspiratorial explanations and the conspiracy theorists examined in this
book, who believe everything bad that has ever happened is part of an all-engulfing,
centuries-old plot.

The late historian Richard Hofstadter coined the phrase "the paranoid style in American
politics" to describe the tradition of casting one's enemies as pawns of a vast, mysterious conspiracy. Paranoia is a psychiatric term for a mental state in which people, seized with a
sense of grandeur, believe enemies are scheming against them. A paranoid might, for example,
hear imaginary voices and conclude that the FBI is invading his mind with radio waves because
he is the last sane person on earth. In political paranoia, people exalt their own race, nation, or
religion above all others; they feel persecuted as a group. They imagine that NBC, CBS, ABC, the
newspapers, schools, and publishing industry are invading everyone's mind with new ideas,
trying to overthrow the old way of life.

In a sense, they are right: society is in constant flux; the media and the schools are agents of
change. Those who believe mankind's salvation lies with progress see modernization as an
advance; the less enthusiastic see it as inevitable. But those who believe traditions are
sacrosanct see change as erosion.

To the conspiracy theorists, the erosion is planned. They see their way of life not as one of many
that must contend in the political marketplace, but as the expression of absolute truth. They
believe their religion is the one true faith, that American democracy is the one true political
system, that laissez-faire capitalism is the one true economic system. In a society that is
coming to reject such absolutism for a more flexible, cosmopolitan view, they feel like
outsiders. Because they assume the world is divided between forces of good and evil, they
consider their opponents not as representatives of a rival philosophy but as dark conspirators.

Political paranoia is most obvious in the conspiracy theories of extremist groups like the John
Birch Society and the hundreds of survivalist and right-wing political organizations that form
what is known as the radical right. There are at most several hundred thousand Americans who
support these groups or subscribe to their publications. But beliefs that are overt among the
extremists can be implicit in much larger segments of the population.

I first became aware of how widespread the paranoid style of politics has become when I worked
as a reporter for the Minneapolis Star, covering what my editors and I called the "idea beat." By
writing about philosophy, politics, religion, and science, I tried to penetrate the surface of the
daily news to get readers to think about the ideas and beliefs that motivate events. I was interested in
uncovering the underlying assumptions that determine the way we perceive the world. I was
especially interested in the way reality looks to people whose beliefs are very different from
mine.

As I wrote about fundamentalist Protestants, creationists, survivalists, antiabortionists, and
members of right-wing political movements such as the Moral Majority and the new Right, I
was struck by the degree to which their world views coincide. Although the details of what
members of these groups believe vary widely, many of them share a way of thinking that is
very similar to the paranoid style. They tend to perceive reality as a tightly constructed system
in which good fights evil for control of the earth; in which all problems occur because of satanic
plans; in which civilization is declining toward an inevitable Armageddon. As I interviewed
members of these groups and studied their writings, I realized that the most important
difference between them and their opponents is not so much that they disagree on specific
issues, but that they believe the world works in different ways.

As a pluralist who believes there are many possible ways to explain reality, and as a secular
humanist who believes that knowledge discovered by humans must take precedence over the
biblical word of God, I was considered by members of many of the groups I studied to be an
enemy. As a representative of the press, which champions a pluralistic, secular view, I was
often eyed with suspicion.

When I interviewed Robert White, leader of a national right-wing organization called the Duck
Club, he told me that the Minneapolis Star was part of an anti-American plot because its
publisher belonged to the Trilateral Commission, an organization that promotes stronger
international ties. After I wrote a series of articles about conspiracy theorist Lyndon
LaRouche's pronuclear political cult (the people in the airports with the signs that say Feed
Jane Fonda to the Whales), his followers denounced me in one of their magazines as part of a
conspiracy of elitists that began in ancient Egypt.

White's and LaRouche's reactions were extreme - even within the fantastic world of political paranoia - but they demonstrated to me the friction that
develops when world views collide. Like oil and water, the worlds of absolutists and pluralists
are microscopically structured such that it is difficult for them to mix. They are immiscible
paradigms - systems of thought that are, by nature, almost mutually exclusive. This book is an
attempt to overcome that built-in barrier and help the people caught on each side learn to see
how the world looks through alien eyes.

In writing this book, I have tried to avoid becoming a conspiracy theorist myself. As I chart the
course of political paranoia, names of leaders of various extremist groups appear on the rosters
of other groups, which have traits in common with still others. But what I believe I am mapping
is a way of thinking, not a monolithic plot. While these groups share the same style of thinking,
many of them differ in the substance of their beliefs. While some conspiracy theorists are antiSemitic, others, like Jerry Falwell, are strong supporters of Israel. Some conspiracy theorists
are anti-Catholic; others are devout followers of the church. Leftists, of course, have
conspiracy theories of their own, though generally not as all-embracing and supernatural as
the right-wing versions described in this book.

I have also tried to avoid succumbing to the conspiracy theorists' tendency to paint the world
black and white. Although political paranoia is destructive, its targets are not all necessarily
admirable. I have no desire to defend or condemn groups such as the Trilateral Commission or
the Council on Foreign Relations.

And, finally, I do not contend that there are no such things as conspiracies. Consider Watergate,
or the Italian banking scandal of 1981, which involved a secret Freemasonic lodge and led to the
resignation of the country's prime minister. But even real conspiracies are not the rigid,
mechanistic closed systems the political paranoids see. They consist of people, not mindless
pawns of evil. They are best understood and combated without the blinders of paranoia.

The purpose of this book is to demystify. At the root of even the strangest legend there are often seeds of truth. By understanding how history can be
rearranged and used as a weapon against enemies, perhaps we can learn the dangers of seeing the
world through what William Blake called "mind-forged manacles."